Although Celtic conceded four, the scoreline did not flatter Benfica. The Portuguese side created chances aplenty in both halves and hit the woodwork twice in addition to their four goals. <\/p>\n
Celtic’s lack of depth in defence was exposed once again in the absence of the injured Cameron Carter-Vickers as Gianluca Prestianni and Duran tormented the visitors’ back four.<\/p>\n
However, it is in forward areas where O’Neill perhaps has his biggest headache.<\/p>\n
Club record signing Kasper Hogh was hooked at half-time and has now failed to score in 10 of his first 11 outings since joining from Bodo\/Glimt in the summer.<\/p>\n
Duran shifted inside for the second half and posed far more of a threat than his Danish team-mate.<\/p>\n
“If I’m a creative midfield player and I’ve got Duran and Hogh to pick from, I’m taking Duran every day of the week,” former Celtic midfielder Scott Allan said.<\/p>\n
“He looks to get off the side of defenders, if you put a ball in the area, he’s more likely to be alive to it.<\/p>\n
“Hogh just isn’t firing on all cylinders. I can take that if he’s doing the other side of the game a lot better than he is.<\/p>\n
“You can see why Martin O’Neill made the substitution at half-time and there’s no doubt Celtic looked much better going forward.”<\/p>\n
O’Neill admitted he sees Duran as being better through the middle, when asked about his Colombian talisman post-match, but given Hogh’s price tag he might not be inclined to pull him out of the firing line just yet.<\/p>\n
“[Duran] has played wide at his previous clubs,” O’Neill said. “But I personally feel his best position is through the middle.<\/p>\n
“It’s now a matter of us trying to fit him in and I think we can do that. It’s a real battle for places now.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Although Celtic conceded four, the scoreline did not flatter Benfica. The Portuguese side created chances aplenty in both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-804009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-gb","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}